Many people overlook the importance of a separate, minimal size, partition for /mnt. The reason that this is important becomes clear when using removable drives (like Jaz drives). If the mount fails (perhaps an improperly formated device being mounted by an unattended process, like a backup), the /mnt subdirectory (e.g., /mnt/jaz) is still available; data written to that directory will end up in the root ("/") filesystem, possibly leading to the failure of other processes. By creating a minimal filesystem for /mnt, the system is protected from mount failures.